Holiday

A mere 8 days after returning from my own trip abroad, I had the good fortune of reliving a shadow of my trip to Milan while watching the Guthrie’s production of Roman Holiday. While I can’t say that my trip included a lot of spontaneous musical numbers, I definitely appreciated the hustle and bustle of Italian street life, the penchant for good gelato, and the afternoon sips of wine (champagne in Holiday’s case) mirrored in the Cole Porter show.

The voices of all the actors were perfect and while the Joe Bradley character was a bit more selfish than I recall of Gregory Peck, the transformation from self-serving newsman to heartstring-tugged gentleman was touching and believable, a not-easy task (in my mind) when faced with the pace of the dialogue and the more saccharine of Porter’s songs.

Porter, of course, was a genius. He summated seemingly complicated emotions into the black and white (the Night and Day, as it were) of “I want to be with you, only you, forever” and gave it a lilt with a turn of phrase that kept the romance of that complication. All the tumbling, fussy emotions of new attachment were always tied up into lyrics that captured exactly the intensity of that messy, exhilarating feeling (without tripping over themselves the way we bloggers tend to do when trying to describe in words what Porter did in melody).  Night and Day has always been one of my favorites of Porter’s, for just that reason.  Because, at its simplest, love is about wanting to experience every inch of the day and night in the company of another, specific soul; finding someone to share the adventures and the disasters in equal part.

The story ends, of course, with a bittersweet tone.  No forever-type commitment.  No “I love you”s exchanged.  A final glance, a “thank you” for an adventure well-spent, and the continuation of separate lives.  As relationship endings go, however, that has to be one of the best. And despite the inability of these two lovers to fit snugly into one another’s lives, the audience does get the sense that each has been effectively shaken and inspired enough to demand some flavor of that adventure in future loves. And I think most people can relate to that moment of realization that love doesn’t work without being buddies. And gelato and trips to Rome help, too.

The Attempt

A few days following my return from Geneva, I ran Grandma's Marathon in Duluth, Minnesota.  Ever since I ran the Twin Cities Marathon for the first time in 2009, I've wanted to try my hand at Grandma's as I'd heard it was a tougher course, but stunningly beautiful.

The course curves around Lake Superior between Two Harbors and Duluth, which makes for a pretty breathtaking first 15 miles.  After that, honestly, it's kind of a blur, but by then I was running through residential areas and eventually downtown Duluth, so the "breathtaking" element was probably substantially reduced.

This was not my greatest race, by a long shot.  Throughout my training I'd been pacing to beat my previous times (5:17 and 5:19 for 2009 and 2011, respectively).  I was shooting for anything below 5:15, hoping for something sub-5:10 (my goal is to eventually run a sub-5:00 marathon) and barely eeked out a sub-5:40 race. 5:36 hurts a bit, to be honest. I'm almost embarrassed.  Almost.

I was working with a couple of variables I hadn't dealt with before, sleeping in a dorm the night before, and, most glaringly, a 2 week trip to Geneva that landed me back in the States 4 days prior to the race.  That meant my training was not only thrown off but, more importantly at that point, my nutrition/hydration.  By the last two weeks before a race I've done all of the important training runs.  I'm not building mileage anymore, I'm tapering away from it to give my body time to rest after weeks of abuse.  But for me, those two weeks are crucial simply for getting my head/body in a state of (what feels like) tip top shape.  I sleep a lot more. I don't drink alcohol. I nurse a bottle of water all day. I load up on fruits and veggies and protein. And I keep my carbs at a low-ish level until a week before the race and then I start to ramp them up each day.  I'm deliberate about my diet, obsessive maybe.

That obsession, however, did not stand a chance when faced with evening business dinners and white martinis, rich sauces, chocolate croissants, and restaurants that charged more for water than for a glass of wine. It was definitely a gustatory playground that I thoroughly enjoyed, but I also knew I'd pay for that revelry.  And I did pay, from miles 17-26.2.

Geneva, however, was worth one bad race.  Grandma's was my third marathon and even before I started it I knew she wouldn't be my last.  I knew there were other races I had my eye on (New York, Marine Corps, Big Sur, Chicago, that-one-in-France-with-wine-at-every-mile). So a dismal showing this past weekend doesn't feel like failure, just a learning experience along the way. I enjoyed the first 15 miles, enjoyed spending time with my favorite cheerleader (my Marmee), and enjoyed the freedom of celebrating 26.2 miles with several beers, a burger, AND a corndog, at a concert later that day.

The more I run, the more I appreciate how it makes me feel.  I appreciate the effort, despite the frequent disappointments and frustrations with my slow little legs.  I appreciate the ache after a task attempted, even if that task didn't quite succeed as I had hoped.

There will be other races.

Wandering

I ventured to Milan for all of 30 hours over a weekend while in Geneva for work.  It's the type of thing, the venturing, that I always imagined I would do if given the opportunity, but aside from solo trips to Marrakech while in the Peace Corps, I have never traveled alone abroad.

I was nervous at first, but not excruciatingly so.  I bought my train ticket from Geneva to Milan days before the trip and picked up the ticket at the train station the evening before. There were a couple hiccups (you need your passport to pick up a train ticket? If I bat my eyelashes can I squeak by with a driver's license?) before leaving the station (I read French fairly well and I still can't figure out what the hell the ticket says about my train car and how that corresponds to the actual platform).  But I was snug in my seat with a sandwich and an old, oft-forgotten journal with ten minutes to spare.

The journey from Geneva to Milan is stunning.  You wrap around Lake Geneva, curving through Lausanne, rumbling past smaller towns and green fields with snow-capped mountains in the distance. I jotted nothing in my journal, there was too much to see to waste time trying to document it.  That feeling doesn't often strike me, that writing of something beautiful is meaningless with the beauty right there, but sitting next to a window with an almost-too-bright sun glancing off the waters, I had no desire to put my eyes to paper.

In Italy they speak Italian, which is, were you aware?, a completely different language.  It's funny how the brain works.  While in Geneva, I could function pretty well with my clumsy, dusty French.  In Italy, where I spoke nothing, my brain seemed to revert back to the last time I felt wholly overwhelmed by a foreign tongue: Morocco.  On more than one occasion, when needing to ask for directions or asking for help, the first words in my brain were Arabic, not French.  It's as if my brain recognized that feeling of linguistic helplessness and just reached for the words that last accompanied that anxiety.  French, not Arabic, came in handy a few times, but for the most part I spent the weekend pointing at things when I wanted them, smiling stupidly when people asked me questions, and simply not speaking to pretty much anyone.

I wandered around Milan for hours.  I got lost multiple times.  I'm not an excellent map-reader (as any friend who has watched me get lost after examining a map at the mall can attest). I can usually figure things out but not in a hurry.  This worked out alright as I was all alone, nobody to guide or frustrate as I fumbled with which direction might be North. I could stare at that map for half an hour and there was nobody around to care.  While that did take the pressure off, I'm not the most patient of people so if I couldn't figure it out quickly I tended to just start walking with the assumption that maybe I'd figure it out better if I was in a different spot (don't ask me how that logic works).

Mild frustrations while being lost in the park near Castello Sforenzco notwithstanding, the wandering was the best part.  Better than the gelato, better than the spires of the Duomo, better than the beep and whiz of motor scooters. I am not an introvert by any standard.  I thrive on people and being near them, talking to them, making them laugh, telling stories, hearing stories, exploring the insides of other's ideas, offering my own.  But that extroversion leaves room, and need, for time spent wholly wrapped within my own head, digesting my own environment and not deciphering how it fits into this or that relationship.  I make time for that often but it's rare that I have two straight days of wandering where I please, not only physically, but mentally, too. To be alone in a place full of inspirations, and to have the luxury of absorbing it in whatever way I saw fit, was a blessing beyond the immediate photo opportunity.

On the way back to Geneva I had an hour or so to kill at the Milan train station.  I tucked myself away on a bench and sipped an orange juice while watching the trains roll in and out.  I love orange juice, the fresh, pulpy kind, and that was the variety I held in my hand.  Trains, one of my favorite things on the planet, surrounded me, their engines muffling the sound of dashing high heels, crying babies, the roll of luggage wheels. It struck me that I was nestled in a moment full of many favorites, simple favorites, trains, orange juice, wandering, sitting still, watching.

It wasn't a moment I could take a picture of, not really, nor properly document with a poem or pretty paragraph.  It was just a simple, noisy blessing that felt built for me, crafted by God for my singular attention. I realized that God was the only one who fully (completely, utterly, everything-y) grasped how that moment felt for me, how the exterior (the trains, the juice, the map reading, the blisters of feet that don't want to stop walking, the mild humidity) and the interior (the peace, the calm, the pleasant ache of being alone and not lonely) wrapped around each other and formed a perfect nest of Happy. So I thanked Him for that, knowing He would be the only one who'd every recognize where the gratitude came from and the only one to whom such gratitude was owed.